Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Herzogenrath, Bernd, ed. Deleuze/Guattari and Ecology. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Taken together with Issue Number 15 (Summer 2007) of the online journal Rhizomes, Bernd Herzogenrath's collection provides a fairly comprehensive mapping of the relations between Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy and what we might call "ecologism". If one were to accept Arne Naess's distinctions among ecology, ecophilosophy, and ecosophy (invoked by Bogue, p.43), it would have been better to title the volume "Deleuze/Guattari and Ecophilosophy" inasmuch as Deleuze and Guattari are doing philosophy, not science (to which Naess limits his notion of ecology). Ecophilosophy treats the relations between ecological problems and philosophical ones -- certainly a central concern of Deleuze/Guattari. Nevertheless, Guattari himself used ecology in a much broader sense, recognizing the importance of scientific contributions to ecophilosophy, but ultimately stressing the values embodied in humans' relations to the natural environment, which Naess characterizes as "ecosophy". Hence the book's title seems perfectly appropriate. Like most anthologies, this one suffers from some unevenness of quality among the essays, and from something like a lack of focus -- although the field of Deleuze/Guattari-inspired ecological studies may be young enough to explain and excuse this. A slightly different order to the essays, however, could have brought several common themes or emphases into sharper focus. . . .
Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16666.

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WHAT IS 'THEORY'?

Institutionalised philosophy has before it something called 'philosophy,' which is emphatically not philosophy, that does not follow the protocols of that discipline, that does not measure up to apparently transparent standards of logical rigour and clarity. . . . This institutionalised 'philosophy,' which is not itself, produces another paradox as well: it proliferates a second philosophy outside the boundary that philosophy itself has set, and so it seems that philosophy has unwittingly produced this spectral double of itself. It may be that what is practised as philosophy in most of the language and literature departments . . . has come to constitute the meaning of 'philosophy,' and so the discipline of philosophy must find itself strangely expropriated by a double. And the more it seeks to dissociate itself from this redoubled notion of itself, the more effective it is in securing the dominance of this other philosophy outside the boundary that was meant to contain it. (Judith Butler, "Can the 'Other' of Philosophy Speak?" 241)

I shall use the word ‘theorist’ rather than ‘philosopher’ because the etymology of ‘theory’ gives me the connotation I want, and avoids some I do not want. The people I shall be discussing do not think that there is something called ‘wisdom’ in any sense of the term which Plato would have recognised. So the term ‘lover of wisdom’ seems inappropriate. But theoria suggests taking a view of a large stretch of territory from a considerable distance, and this is just what the people I shall be discussing do. They all specialise in standing back from, and taking a large view of, what Heidegger called the ‘tradition of Western metaphysics’ – what I have been calling the ‘Plato-Kant canon.’ (Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity 96)

Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me. (Sigmund Freud)

A man with one theory is lost. He needs several of them, or lots! He should stuff them in his pockets like newspapers. (Bertolt Brecht)

Something is happening to the way we think about the way we think. (Clifford Gertz, "Blurred Genres: the Refiguration of Social Thought" 20)

The history of thought is the history of its models. (Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language)